


The Literate

by LooNEY_DAC



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-16 04:55:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10564047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LooNEY_DAC/pseuds/LooNEY_DAC





	1. Prologue: The Outcast

The ancient and usually dim forest depths were alive with colors this Autumn, a vast panoply of brilliant reds, fervent yellows and dazzling oranges proudly displayed to one and all against the muted backdrop of grayish browns and mossy greens as though a master artist had been given free reign with brush and canvas, but all of this beauty was wasted on the young boy running through its vivid splendor, not from some intrinsic deficiency of soul that inured him to the grandiose vista laid out all around him, but because he was being pursued.

Through thicket and clearing, across mud and over rock, and faster than he'd ever sped before all the while, the boy ran for his life, and the others pursued after him. He had seen too much for them to allow him to live, and so they pursued him.

His feet pattered softly against the forest floor in their thin plastic sheaths, belying the desperate speed of his flight from the others. Though his chest felt like lead and his legs screamed with every quick stride, he dared not let his frantic pace flag, for surely his pursuers were just behind him, waiting for just such a weakness on his part to strike him, that their victory might be all the easier.

The thought that he might actually have outrun or outdistanced his pursuers never entered his mind: he had consistently placed near the back of his cohort in most of the Aerobic Conditioning dailies, and had no expectation that this particular time should prove any different. That knowledge only served to spur him on the faster, all his instincts demanding that, no matter what else happened, he never just give up.

The roots he was running across were thick and gnarled, and covered with a slimy coating of already-shed leaves and moss, presenting formidable opposition to him in his attempts at escape, but with a surety of foot that surprised him even as it relieved him, he shot gracefully across the arboreal obstacle course in a remarkably swift series of jump-steps that resembled nothing so much as a ballet on forward scan, his feet not missing a single step.

For even the best of runners, there comes a time when they can run no more, and so it was with the boy. His breath coming in shuddering gasps, his face drenched with sweat yet still burning hot, he slid to a stop beneath a huge, ancient tree, one of the true monarchs of the woods, his legs collapsing beneath him in agonized quivers, and for a long moment, there was near-total silence all around him as he struggled to regain his breath.

A sudden sharp noise had him clumsily trying to regain his feet in swiftly renewed panic, but his exhaustion was such that even this was beyond him; instead, he scuttled, awkwardly and belly-up, in what a learned observer might have described as a remarkably fast crablike waddle around the behemoth of a trunk.

At this new extremity, his enervated body finally failed him. One false step with rubbery legs and slickened shoes was all that it took to send him lurching along a great root into a pile of leaves, tumbling down a concealed slope beneath and so falling into darkness...


	2. Part One: The Society of Angels

_For one vertiginous moment after the boy opened his eyes, his mind couldn’t accept what he saw--or, rather, what he didn’t see. The stygian blackness before his eyes seemed to mock him for even trying to penetrate its inky depths._

_Had he gone blind, then? In frantic denial, his mind cast back through the years..._

Alfred 7127 was, in most respects, quite representative of his cohort. A native of Central Three North, he had spent his ten cycles of Pre-Eval in the normal progression, slightly above the median of his cohort, but not anywhere near the top. As was usual for his blood type, he was in Nutrition Group Two-B, which meant he was intolerant of some common foods but not disastrously so. His proficiency in navigating what portions of the Systems Web the Evaluators would allow him access to was, again, intermediate, as were the vast majority of his other proficiencies.

The only extremes on Alfred 7127's Eval actually more or less cancelled each other out: while his Aerobic Conditioning scores were as borderline intolerable as ever (prompting his more athletically inclined fellows to eschew or even disdain his company), his Dexterity score was in the highest percentile. So while the mass of the cohort would spend the next five to seven cycles in their new Apprenticeships becoming Sorters, a few others Artisans, and still fewer others Solvers, his Eval determined his optimal Apprenticeship should be as a Fixer, using his dexterity to repair things in places and ways the Fix-Bots couldn't. This was all quite unexceptionable, so Alfred yet passed into Apprenticeship unremarked.

But Alfred 7127 had a great secret; a secret that he held tightly to himself like the greatest prize ever awarded; a secret that was all his own: he could read, and read quite well.

Reading was Alfred's secret vice, his hobby and his passion; nothing gave him so much pleasure as to devour a newly found work by one of his favorite authors after a hard day of work. This secrecy put another layer of isolation between himself and his cohort.

Ordinarily, there was no need for reading in any occupation, as every set of instructions for every conceivable job was presented both verbally and visually by the Monitors. No others of his cohort could read, insofar as he knew. The signs just weren't there, like little references to characters or situations from stories they'd read that paralleled reality, or inappropriate humor or even foreknowledge from those parallels. These signs in himself were so obvious to him that he sometimes wondered how he'd avoided detection for so long, and suppressing the few that he could simply pushed him further into isolation.

Once, when he was very young, his cohort had thronged to the Fitness Arena to witness the punishment of a Reader who had recently been detected; thus, Alfred personally knew what would happen to him were he ever detected, and that it would be swift, remorseless and very, very unpleasant.

Despite the dangers, Alfred 7127 read on, and his reading was to prove his salvation, though until it did, he anticipated rather the opposite eventuality. Not that he was careless about his reading; rather the opposite, as previously mentioned. No, Alfred 7127 was most careful in his reading, as he had been from the beginning.

Of course, he never would have learned to read had he not been so insatiably curious. Said curiosity had led him to spend his free periods roaming the General Access corridors, driving him to find out what precisely lay around the next bend in ever-longer, ever more probing perambulations.

Most of his explorations came to nothing, of course, and not a few led to his being late for the next programmed item for his cohort, with predictably stern punishments following. But once, he had ventured into a long-disused sector of the complex, its corridors dim and dusty, and had found in the unused chambers they led to a single antiquated data card, its contents almost certainly wiped clean by time or by obsolescence, or so he’d assumed.

A tablet made to accept the data card was not long in forthcoming, once he gave the various chambers a more thorough going-over, but what he found on card and tablet changed his life. The tablet’s OS and the card’s contents were text based, not graphics only.

For a long time, Alfred was stumped, but he reasoned that there might be something useful even deeper in the abandoned sector, and so he probed ever more, until he found the Course-Room. It was eerily similar to the Course Room where he had studied; there were times when he expected his classmates to scramble in for another round of instruction. And yet, this Course Room had been abandoned for quite some time; possibly even since before the Last War; and one of the first things he found was another tablet, this one with mixed text-and-icons.

Not every program or function had a corresponding icon, so Alfred had yet quite a bit to figure out. Gradually, though, he began to match the text commands to those functions he recognized, and to figure out the syntax and context of what he was looking at. Finding an ancient version of the language arts course with a complete literacy tutorial was almost anticlimactic, but still helped with the few errors he’d inevitably made. In fact, soon his literacy outstripped the Course Room’s capability to instruct.

It seemed reading had come all too naturally to Alfred 7127, and soon, he was reading everything and anything he could find, despite the risk. Reading was the light of his life now; without it, he’d feel like an automaton, merely going through the motions of life without actually living it.

_Yes, reading had become the light of his life after that, but now, he couldn’t see. Had his precipitate fall deprived him of his sight, and with it, his greatest pleasure?_


End file.
